First time player, first no tutorial game. Am I doing good?

[kaistern]

Turn 345: I have decided to call the game as the xeno have zero ships left and I now have vipers stationed above every remainning xeno planet, and I have more vipers and marine craft pouring into xeno space every turn. At this point it is just a question of how long does it take my marine craft to conquer them all. Throughout the entire game I never lost so much as a single ship.

fallen: It really must lol. Most of my vipers have at least 5 kills a peice and some of the more veteran one have as many as 10. My flag ship, one of the templar defenders you start the game with, has 15 kills.

For my next game i am think of using the same map and difficulty but bumping it to 2 enemies

[kaistern]

I think i am going to update my game first though lol

[fallen]

Great posts and thanks for sharing. We are working on increasing the power and variety of alien AI in late game.

[khamya9]

Jan 13, 2015 11:24:35 GMT -5 fallen said:

Great posts and thanks for sharing. We are working on increasing the power and variety of alien AI in late game.

The ai really needs the ability to pull off a "come from behind", but without making the game hopeless. Right now they are a threat early, and once you get ahead their only hope is to time an attack with a major political upheaval. So the player gets economic trouble at the same time as military trouble.

In another thread I gave some ideas on having them use their hordes of obsolete ships in long range moves,which also breaks the monotony and can lead to surprise attacks from the flanks instead of having a single meatgrinder blockade.

But at the underlying core is the issue that the ai has no strategy, and fighting it is purely a tactical action. All ai worlds are the same, and it acts only based on geography. The ai always attacks the closest human worlds, and shoots the closes human ships.

There was an old strategy game by brad wardell at stardock called galactic civilizations. One unique thing it added was to have the ai identify player worlds as one of four categories (industry, population, economy, untyped) and then use some basic logic WHY the human was strong and focus attacks (up to and including planet killers) on the most important worlds to that strength.

So if you were winning because of a huge cash economy and subsidizing all your construction, it would fly rfleets right past your factory worlds and bomb your worlds with the highest income. But if you had a strut!ing economy and were fighting back purely based on mass producing cheap warships, it would go for your worlds with the highest construction capacity.

Something like that could work here too, however, the ai needs some better ability to get past the front lines. Sending small attack fleets around to flank the human empire, or come at it from two or three points. Possibly give them boarding ships and using the disable effect to allow world killers to get past the blockade and into the human core world's to wreck havoc.

At the same time, giving the ai some differences between planets, so that there is a reason to bomb world a in preference to world b. Right now the only consideration is supply lines. Nothing else matters when fighting the am, as all its worlds are the same.

If there was a reason for me to push a fleet three turns past the front lines and cripple or wipe out an ai world because it was making four times as many ships as any other, or that it was the key world for raising their tech, etc then I'd pull ships from my lines to do that. This would leave a hole for the ai to do the same. Now we have moving battle lines and exciting combat instead of the stationary meat grinder that usually happens.

Plus the ai could gut my economy by blasting a few of my devaltos worlds, then I have to lean on my cadar factories to hold them line until I can rebuild. Which might change the whole tempo of my game.
T

[khamya9]

Jan 13, 2015 0:55:54 GMT -5 kaistern said:

Turn 345: I have decided to call the game as the xeno have zero ships left and I now have vipers stationed above every remainning xeno planet, and I have more vipers and marine craft pouring into xeno space every turn. At this point it is just a question of how long does it take my marine craft to conquer them all. Throughout the entire game I never lost so much as a single ship.

fallen: It really must lol. Most of my vipers have at least 5 kills a peice and some of the more veteran one have as many as 10. My flag ship, one of the templar defenders you start the game with, has 15 kills.

For my next game i am think of using the same map and difficulty but bumping it to 2 enemies

That map is really, really fun. Also try the degla, three xeno "extreme" map. With two ai its not so hard but tacticaly it has some very cool geography and games go many different ways depending on where the ai starts.